Midwest Bagel Quest drives to Brooklyn

Seen at the Days Inn by Wyndham in Milan, OH

 Last week my son and I drove from Madison to Brooklyn, NY with a stop in Lenox, MA to pick up my dad for family Passover at my brother's home. I don't mind this 16 hour drive on I90 and I80 to get from Wisconsin to NY, I have done it many times. Give me a book on tape, my favorite car snacks, a curated playlist and a fountain soda and I am good to go. We pulled into the Days Inn in Milan, Ohio after 11pm, I had a crappy night of sleep, and dragged myself to the hotel breakfast buffet bright and early and found the worst looking bagel I have seen in a long time. As I stared at this bagel while eating my mass produced yogurt, I thought about the Thompson Bagel Machine and all the trouble it started. Mickey Thompson grew up in England, the son of a baker. Sometime after WWI he built his first bagel machine in his workshop above a bakery. Years later his son invented the Thompson Bagel Machine, which the Lenders leased in 1963 and kickstarted the mass production of bagels, leaving us to be confronted with this truly terrible bagel. I wondered if Mickey, someone who presumably cared about the quality of his bagels, would care that he started in motion a process that led to the ability to churn out hundreds of bagels an hour, but they would all be substandard. Would he care that he was sorta the Oppenheimer of bagels, having unleashed a technology that cannot be controlled? 

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My brother has lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn since 1985. I have never given much thought to where the best bagels are in Brooklyn since Josh lives within a ten minute walk from many bagel shops. But now that I am on my self-appointed Midwest Bagel Quest comparing Midwest bagels to NYC bagels, I wanted to remind myself what NYC bagels taste like. I don't think of Park Slope as a bagel neighborhood, but I was hear to visit family and not travel to the Upper West Side or Queens for bagels. I decided to do some research to see if any Park Slope bagels make any "best of" lists. Turns out that three do: Terrace Bagels (15 minute walk from Josh's house), Shelsky's Brooklyn Bagels (eight  minute walk), and Bagel Hole (seven minute walk.)

My daughter Tamar and her partner Sky and I all arrived in Brooklyn on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, two days before Passover. I wasn't sure if I was going to do the unleavened bread thing for all of Passover, so Saturday was the day to eat bagels. I decided to try Terrace Bagels since it is a block from the park and we could find a patch of grass to eat our bagels.

Terrace Bagels is a great looking bagel shop. Tubs of all kinds of cream cheese and many bins of bagels. Not only did they have pumpernickel bagels, they had pumpernickel everything bagels. The bagels were warm, fresh out of the oven. But there was no getting around the fact that these were large doughy bagels. A great bagel has a few hurdles it needs to clear. Does it have a shiny crispy exterior that feels almost a little bit crispy when you bit into it? Terrace Bagels cleared that hurdle easily. Does it have a good flavor? Ditto. And does it have the right interior texture. Now this might sound like an unreasonable fine line to the uninitiated, but a great bagel needs to be chewy yet not doughy. With their very large bagels, while tasty, the Terrace bagels were simply too doughy. 

Sitting in Prospect Park, with Brooklyn all around me, eating Brooklyn bagels that I liked but didn't love, I started to worry where the narrative arc of this Midwest Bagel Quest is going to wind up. Would this story end with me deciding that some of the Midwest bagels I tried during this quest were the superior bagel?  That the guy who hand-rolled bagels and sold them out of his house in Ann Arbor, MI made better bagels than what I could buy in Park Slope? I realized I had to taste bagels from the other two bagel shops on the "best of" list. So leavened bread or not, I would be visiting Shelsky's Brooklyn Bagels and Bagel Hole during Passover. 

One of my theories about why NYC bagels are so great, more than the quality of the water, is that NYC is a walking city. There are so many people that live in this city, walking into a neighborhood bagel shop all day long, that most of these shops are making bagels all day long. The bagels are almost always warm. That was true at Shelsky's and Bagel Hole. Every time I visit my brother I go to the no-frills Bagel Hole and never ventured down to 4th avenue for Shelsky's. But now that I gave them both a fair shot, it was obvious that both of these bagels were delicious. If I lived in Park Slope I would probably let what errands I was running or what subway stop I was walking home from decide if I bought bagels at the 4th avenue Shelsky's or the 7th avenue Bagel Hole. 

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The whole premise of my bagel quest is that I am a NY Jew judging Midwest bagels. So I wasn't in Brooklyn to render judgment on the bagels. But when a choice had to be made, the choice was Bagel Hole. I care an unreasonable amount about the crispy exterior of a bagel, and this is where Bagel Hole shines.  When my husband asked me where he should buy the dozen bagels before we left for our 15 hour drive back to Madison...the answer was clear. Bagel Hole, because of its exterior crispness. I take my car snacks seriously and prefer to not stop for lunch. A bagel, cream cheese and cucumber slices can get you many miles down the road.  And while we were traveling with cucumber and dill, we were not traveling with a toaster. We stopped again to spend a night at the Days Inn in Milan, Ohio. This time with my son, husband and father. None of us even looked twice at the bagel behind the plexiglass in the makeshift breakfast area, we had better bagels waiting for us in the car.